Microsoft has officially denied that it’s working with a Taiwanese manufacturer to develop a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360.
On Tuesday Register Hardware reported that the software giant had inked a deal with Lite-On for the development of Xbox 360 Blu-ray drives. It was claimed the drives would be integrated into a smaller and …

Re: I wouldn't be suprised if...

I think YOU should take your trolling somewhere else. Mark didn't mention the PS3 (or even alluded to it) at all in his post. He simply took a light-hearted view of Microsoft's past statements, which have nothing to do with anything about the PS3. Methinks someone (i.e. YOU) is a bit too sensitive when it comes to the 360. Chill out.

Why not come clean?

WE know that Microsoft chose the wrong product, so why not adopt a bit of honesty for a change, admit that they made a mistake and then make a statement informing new and existing customers that they will make their product compatable with today's market?

All they're doing is just driving anyone considering a games console towards the PS3.

@Richie M

No, there are at least a couple of games that require the hard drive. Every variant of Football Manager, and Final Fantasy XI. Mark would no doubt argue for the inclusion of Burnout Paradise, because you can't use the multiplayer without one, but that's pushing it a bit.

Microsoft didn't deny HDMI outright, they tried to explain why you didn't really need one because the VGA output looks just as good. Which it does. Still, it's nice to have, since some people don't have a VGA in on the telly. I don't have a spare HDMI meanwhile, so I can't say I'm bothered about the issue.

Prevarication and hand-waving justifications of features your competitor has are standard operating feature, though, as Mark's beloved company demonstrated with the whole "Vibration is just _so_ last-gen" nonsense and the way they've stopped trying to have a go at Microsoft's patchy backward-compatibility strategy the moment they announced the 40Gb PS3.

To pick a less confrontational example, there's Nintendo's "nobody really needs HD" explanation for not allowing the Wii over 576p even for titles that have enough polygon simplicity to run smoothly at higher resolutions.

Ummm..

Actually El Reg, Microsoft have not denied they are working with Lite-on to develop a BR drive for the xBox.

They have denied that Lite-on are manufacturing Blu-ray drives for the xBox. Note present tense.

They didn't say Lite-on weren't developing, nor that Lite-on would be making them in the future, just that they weren't at the time you ask (possibly because it was night in Taiwan and they'd all gone home).

Tired

Its the same old boring comments again and again and again.

XBox HDMI booo, XBox HDD boooo, lets pick holes with things that don't really matter. There are criticisms in both factions, deal with it. Sony have got far more problems to deal with that the XBox. UK:R highlight them perfectly.

The dual shock 3 is a perfect example of a complete ballsup on Sony's part. If only Phil Harrison were here...

what do you expect?

I'm kinda tired of [Sony|Microsoft] being accused of denying something and then doing it anyway. Yeah, they do it, and yeah, they're lying. So what? Seriously, what do you expect them to do? If they admitted openly that a BR Xbox was in the works, sales would plummet.

Frankly, while I don't particularly enjoy being lied to, I find it hard to blame a company for acting sensible.

I'm with Tired

If there was a news reports about a high profile governing body president spanking working girls with Blu-ray disks, then someone would pipe up about it not been possible because the "fking DRM would have crippled the disk beforehand and stop it happening" and slag Sony off.

If there was a news report about a celebrity bashing somebody's skull in with a 360 some prick would comment about it not been possible because the "cruddy 360 would RROD and stop him doing any such thing".

The 360 Failure Rate Is A Non-Issue

With all of my customers that have had a 360 fault, they've returned it and had it back within 2 weeks. Not one of them thought that was a bad thing, it worked well for each of them.

People understand that things go wrong, hardware breaks. So long as Microsoft do the right thing and repair the machines free of charge, people don't have an issue.

The people that seem to have an issue are PS3 owners, who are still so annoyed about their own consoles long list of issues and low acceptance rate that they feel the need to lash out at a console that has far more support and interest from the general public.

@Ian Rathbone

LOL...

"The people that seem to have an issue are PS3 owners, who are still so annoyed about their own consoles long list of issues and low acceptance rate"

What issues would those be? I don't have ANY issues at all, and the PS3's adoption rate is faster than the 360's ever was. It reached 1million in the UK quicker than the 360, it will surely reach 2 million considerably quicker with this seasons exclusives, and globally, the gap between 360 and PS3 sales is less than 6 million, which ia bad considering the 12 month headstart in US and 18 month headstart in Europe.

Clever Semantics

Note the use of the present tense. In other words, Lite-On is not *presently* manufacturing Blu-ray driver for Xbox 360. This doesn't preclude Lite-On (or even another manufacturer) making Blu-ray drives for Xbox 360 in the near future.

Of course, Microsoft will understandably deny the existence of a new model until current inventory has been sold.

Remember Microsoft denying that Windows 95 would run on top of MS-DOS? "Plus ca change..."

@James

That'd be about now then since you've been able to download HD movies on XBox live for some months now. Full HD no, but its certainly HD.

Microsoft took a punt on HD-DVD but didn't bother throwing any real money behind it as it was a secondary concern, can't see them bothering in the slightest with Blu, it certainly won't add anything to the 360. Besides with Blu build costs they'd probably have to charge about £200 for an add-on unit and who on earth would pay that?

And to the PS3 fan boys, sure you don't have any bricked PS3s but then thats probably due to under use due to a complete lack of any decent games!!

Denials, Denial, and projection

I did not have handshaking with that interface. We may have flirted with USB ports, but I did not handshake with that drive's interface.

As usual denials can take on an air of unreality, especially when they're proven false shortly thereafter. Microsoft and Sony are both so guilty of this it's hard to take any denial from either of them seriously.

You know Mark really made some excellent points about the 360 (though was probably a little enthusiastic with the failure rate). I don't remember seeing him even mention Sony's console, so all those bashing him and his comment for being PS3 fanboyism need to worry more about their own projection than about his supposed fanboyism.

As others have pointed out, The 360 suffers an atypically high failure rate. CE industry accepted norms for failure rate are approximately 3% or less. Not 17%, 20%, 33%, or whatever double digit % people which to assert today.

360 was stripped down prior to launch with the removal of the HDD from the base platform. MS stated this was not a problem and that no games would require the HDD. Sadly, this is not true, some games do, and some games require the HDD for any online play. XBL Arcade games are limited to 150MB mostly because the potential lack of HDD presents a problem for storing large downloadable games locally.

HDMI was dismissed by Microsoft as irrelevant time and again. Microsoft actually came out and stated categorically that no game would ever run at 1080p, and that it wasn't necessary to have HDMI. In the end though, MS added HDMI, and some truly 1080p games have arrived on the PS3, though 720p is clearly the standard. If HDMI is so unimportant, why bother adding it?

The point isn't a comparison of Microsoft and Sony, the point is that Microsoft have made some key statements and then performed total 180 subsequently claiming that they never made such statements. It's all BS.

It's like this attempt to distract the HD market post HD-DVD. While HD-DVD was engaged with Blu-Ray, digital downloads were not the flavor of the day. Suddenly with the demise of HD-DVD they become all the rage. The trouble is that with the exception of a tiny, and I mean truly tiny, minority of US, Japanese and UK Internet customers no one has the bandwidth needed to perform HD streaming or downloads. The solutions so far are to compress the living crap out of the content (thus negating the HD nature of it) or to perform silly math and claim that in just a couple of years we'll be able to download an HD movie in mere minutes.

The truth is that most people's peak bandwidth wouldn't be sufficient for even the compressed 'HD' downloads, and even if they were, if millions of customers all started streaming HD movies over the net rather than buying the disk, the net would fail almost immediately. The amount of investment needed in even the elite western nations to make truly high speed broadband Internet universal is colossal and not something that ISPs are going to undertake out of the goodness of their hearts. Look at Comcast, they have a new 50Mbit/second service in one metro area in the US. It starts (starts!!) at $150. And this all supposes that we are all going to suddenly have multi-terabyte disk arrays in our living rooms to host our HD video library. Yep, I can see all of this just springing up in a coupe of years. Oh yeah, I can see it all now. Oh, wait, there's some pigs flying past me....

In the end I still think that Microsoft has a big problem on their hands with the integration of a BluRay player into the 360. I don't see how they can integrate one without alienating their existing customers. So they have to make an add-on. An add-on is pointless since it's movies only and stand alone players will ultimately be cheaper and more capable. Then again, downloads are not the answer in the short to medium term, and so Microsoft are left without a good option from an operational or tactical point of view. Strategically downloads is a sound direction to take -long term. Sony sees this too, but then Sony includes an HDD in every system, where MS doesn't. So one has to wonder who really sees download as a strategy....

Wow

@ian Rathbone & Highlander

"The people that seem to have an issue are PS3 owners, who are still so annoyed about their own consoles long list of issues and low acceptance rate"

Really? I'm not. In fact i and several PS3 owning friends are not aware of a 'long list of issues'. I was going to buy a x360 because performance wise i don't think there is much (if anything) between them. What stopped me? RROD and high failure rates...

That said, my first PS3 BluRay drive did fail (you rightly point out that we can reasonably expect a percentage of electronic equipment to fail), but.....

how long did Sony take to sort it? 2 weeks?, 1 week? No, I had a doorstep exchange the NEXT day (reported Thursday, swapped Friday).

Xbox 360 is for games and blu-ray is a non issue.

I think due to the fact they have the PC market and either didn't want to harm that or they didn't want their console tarnished with the "just a PC" label decided to focus on the game playing capabilities.

Blu-Ray has NO effect on this and apart from a few fanboys who can say "PS3 sold this many" it's a non-issue. If you look at the sales of games per console sold you can see the 360 is far more popular with gamers than simply looking at the raw figures of how many units of each console. More and more PS3s are being bought as cheap blu-ray devices for HDD movies, my brother has one for this reason. Developers are aware of this and also of the difficulty creating PS3 games, it might have slightly more power (debatable) but there's no reason to not lead with 360 and this won't change for the rest of this generation. Therefore the PS3 has already lost as the main gaming console.

However I suspect that with the next console release MS will probably try to make a more PS3 like multimedia player however even then blu-ray won't be an issue as by then we will have moved to downloadable content. Look at Apple, one of the big backers of blu-ray and they aren't even putting it in their devices. It's now all about online now.

Can someone please explain

why they think they know who i am? Tis fair to say i'm a little weirded out by all this identifying.

And NO FAIL!!! What does that even mean, come on now!?

What issues? Lack of decent online play, and don't quote that "its ok cause its free" crap. PS3 online is nothing compared to XBox Live, even with downtime. Theres a lack of decent exclusive games. Theres changes in hardware specs, pulling backwards compatibility, changing of the SIXAXIS and the constant catchup to match the features of the XBox. Still crying out for the in game crossbar and voice chat? Had it since day one dude. LOL

Don't quote crap either, even if you could show me that the PS3 reached 1mill quicker in the UK, it proves nothing. Its still not doing as well wordwide!!! So its not great for them at all!

FAIL right back atcha dude! LOL!

jai you missed the point completely, i said its not about failure rates and points of the past - in the here and now its still advantage 360. Sorry, its just true. Fair enough if you're all happy with your purchase, but if you compare side by side, feature for feature - you've got a better deal with a 360.

Highlander

Sorry to bring it up...

... as it is off point, but the 360 failure rate is much higher than MS officially calculate it.

I post anonymously only because my nickname will give me away to a manager and get a friend in trouble who works at one of the repair centres for the 360's.

MS only count the individual person. They completely discount if a person has had multiple consoles fail and returned. One UK repair centre has over 1700 360 owners who had 6 console failures and around 25000 who have had 2-4 failures. MS only count the person, not the consoles.... This centre currently estimate 35% real failure rate.

MS moved to a repair approach from the automatic replacement largely because the replacement consoles were just as unreliable but it took them too long to realise this. Repairing was cheaper and gave them the chance to kill the problem and help stop the multiple returns from the single individual. But they never counted the multiple, only the first reported failure.

Consider that this has happened world wide at EVERY repair centre....

Sorry to pour petrol on the console bashing, but felt it appropriate given the banding about of some slightly spurious numbers from people. No it isn't official I accept that, but it a reasonably well informed comment and not knee jerk stone throwing people are doing.

@ Mark

"GTA IV, no DLC without a HDD."

ROFL, as opposed to the PS3 which just outright aint getting the DLC?

Bitter much?

Not sure why anyone would ever think Highlanders comments have any credibility, I can only guess that the fact that to this day he's still suggesting no one has the bandwidth for HD movies that coupled with his name he perhaps lives in the backwater depths of scotland which is one of the few places in Europe that does have crap broadband coverage, sat here in North England I've been quite happily enjoying HD movies streamed over standard DSL for ages now.

As for failure rates it's the same old arguments from PS3 fanboys "360 failure rate sucks!!!" well yeah, it did, I don't think anyone disagrees it really sucked but as has been pointed out the issue has been resolved for over a year now, Microsoft are handing out new version consoles with added HDMI instead to those with the failed old versions so what the hell does it matter nowadays? Whilst MS is resolving problems, Sony is merely adding them with the dual shock debacle, the complete removal of backwards compat. and so on - for Sony fanboys to whine about 360 hardware quality now is laughable because for over a year now the 360 has been as quiet and stable as the PS3 ever was.

I think the fact it still comes down to the now gone RROD problem and the death of HD-DVD says a lot for PS3 fanboys - essentially by sticking to this old and dead arguments they're only proving that the 360 is a superior games machine by virtue of the fact they're unable to pick flaws in the size and quality 360s game catalog. Sucks for you fanboys, but that's your fault for choosing the console with no worthwhile games and less worthwhile games due out in the next two years than you can count on your fingers.

I'm not going to deny the PS3 is a great Bluray player, I'm not going to deny that I'd love to play through Resistance, but any suggestion that the PS3 is somehow a superior gaming system otherwise is laughable. It's in solid last place and time and time again software sales for the 3 consoles confirm this. Relatively speaking, no one is buying games for the PS3 full stop - even multi platform games like GRAW2, RB6 Vegas, Call of Duty 4 and Assassins Creed are seeing atrocious sales figures compared to the 360 versions of the same games and 360 exclusives are raping PS3 exclusives by literally millions of units.

Sony simply can't afford to lose money on the systems whilst not making much money back from software titles which is the traditional model for console sales. As the PS3 was Sony's biggest hope for the last few years with the rest of their company doing terribly and other major sections in enormous debt they're going to be worrying seriously at Sony HQ, it's just not good for them all round, probably their only remaining hope is their media business, that is, Bluray and for the short term their movie/music business but long term with their love of DRM, suing of customers and lack of acceptance of a modern business model there's certainly no long term sustainability there - particularly as the likes of iTunes is the number 1 music retailer in existence now taking control further and further from the big 4.

@Rathbone

Cough..

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02/14/ps3_1m_uk_sales_figure/

Hmm.. 42 weeks to 60 weeks..

RE: Online Facility:

Oh, do shut up - the XBOX might have more content that the PS3, but it has also been out longer.. so erm.. yeah, that's really the casing point on that fact. As for the quality - no way matey, unless you are using another service than I am, yo uhave to admit that the service is nothing short of diabolical... It's just so... natty *bleugh*

Get GTA 4 on the 360

I've got the PS3 and 360 and if your trying to decide which to buy the game on get it on the 360

1. Microsofts got the exclusive rights for a year regarding downloadable content and its going to be good stuff.

2. The 1000pt achivements, not THAT important really

3. The controller on the ps3 isn't good for this game. The aiming system means pulling down a trigger fully to lock onto someone and pulling it half down to free aim, trying to do this on the PS3 controller is very irritating. If you get the 360 version you have decent triggers and it works well, also you get rumble feedback.

4. You've got more people on xbox live than PSOnline so the openworld system will be better (although it depends on if your friends have 360s or ps3s too)

@Highlander

"In the end though, MS added HDMI, and some truly 1080p games have arrived on the PS3, though 720p is clearly the standard. If HDMI is so unimportant, why bother adding it?"

It's rather odd, that statement, now. Not just because there are some truly 1080p games on the PS3, but there are some on the 360 as well - Virtua Tennis 3 is 1080p on both formats, for example.

As for HDMI being unimportant, what they said was technically correct - the 1920x1080 VGA output looks just as good. But fortunately, they listened to their customers; more people have a spare HDMI input on their telly than a VGA one, and some people like to use their fancypants audio receivers as a HDMI switcher. HDMI is important for convenience, not any superiority of image quality.

Conversely, I know several people who wished the PS3 offered VGA as well as the current HDMI connection, but they're stuffed.

@AC "@Mark"

Cough..

http://www.n4g.com/News-129170.aspx

Ok, so maybe not a new island as per the 360, but still some DLC - also worth noting that MS are bunging Rockstar a SIGNIFICANT amount of money to get exclusivity (possibly for a year only). Sounds like they are threatened.. personally, I don't see why.. Alot like the 'half-price' xbox titles that are being launched recently. Guessing that's going to hit the old profits somewhat..

@ AC (XBOX FANBOY)

"..for Sony fanboys to whine about 360 hardware quality now is laughable because for over a year now the 360 has been as quiet and stable as the PS3 ever was."

Nonsense, my XB360 is less than a year old (the second one I bought after the first died out of warranty) and it's just as noisy as the first and far noisier than my PS3. It also crashes quite a bit. The PS3 doesn't.

However, I still use it more than the PS3 and will be buying GTAIV for it.

@Iain

Thank you for making my point. Microsoft stated categorically that 1080p was meaningless. Here's a link;

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3152866

The fact that Microsoft no only added hdmi in order to support 1080p in movies and games, but also got games out on the 360 further emphasizes the utter BS that they were talking when they dismissed HDMI. It's obvious now (as it was then) that their dismissal of HDMI had more to do with Sony using it and Microsoft not using it. Whether or not Xbox could push 1080p resolution through VGA is neither here nor there.

@Anonymous Coward

Regarding DSL bit rates and HD video. If you knew anything about the topic you'd have kept silent on the matter. 1) VC-1 compression is employed on BD movies to get the movie onto the Blu-Ray disc. Further compression cannot be performed without loss of quality. In order to get a Blu-Ray movie into a form that can be streamed over DSL, or downloaded in a reasonable timeframe you have to increase your compression ratio by about another 8 times. That is to say, you need to take that 30GB movie and drop it to something more like 4GB.

That said, how many people can download a 4GB file in a reasonable time? Even a 1GB downloadable game takes hours, and I have a decent DSL connection. As usual you (as many other have done in the past) are attempting to apply the utterly narrow focus of your personal experience to the whole world. Even if I were to accept that you had a DSL connection capable of Blu-Ray bitrates (which I don't), I'd be obliged to point out that your connection would be representative of less than 1% of all Internet connections in the western world. Proponents of Download hate it when someone starts applying logic, math and knowledge of networking and storage architectures. They hate it because they are on a hiding to nothing and they know it.

Regarding the reliability of Xbox360, according to the reports that keep emerging from the warranty repair industry and other industry insiders, Microsoft really hasn't fixed their reliability problem. It's better. However even if they cut their number of failures in half that would still mean a failure rate of nearly 17% (based on the widely quoted and accepted 33% failure rate). But let's be charitable and say they cut their failure rate by two thirds. That's still 10% of all Xboxes sold sine they 'solved' (your word) their problem. Still not very good odds, are they?